Ai ya. e-Indigestion.

But hey, it’s happened. I’ve managed to do one of the most difficult tasks to perform — merge a popular wiki with a new, up-and-coming train travel site. Just yesterday, I’ve managed to relink Beijingology.com so that it now goes to the new TrackingChina.com — there’s a special page for people coming in from Beijingology.

The old site was a funny mix. Never known for withholding information like the more secretive souls in society, I started the old Beijingology wiki about six years back because I was going all over the place in Beijing and need a kind of an e-clipboard to keep my mileages and where this and that road would take me. (Beijing maps aren’t horribly made, but they won’t help when you need them to!)

Then came along Subway Line 5. I started snapping pictures of the new line, which was revolutionary, because it was the city’s first-ever north-south line. I wasn’t surprised when there was a new Starbucks along Line 5, because that line meant business for the city. But when I got lost at Huixinxijie Beikou station — when, just to get to a supermarket, I took the wrong exit and went through a residential complex and had to go up a footbridge — I made a resolution to make this the best-ever wiki on the Beijing Subway and Beijing transit because I got lost — and I didn’t like seeing anyone else get lost!

While working with the Beijing Planning Exhibition Hall in 2008, I had a lot of free time outside of accompanying political, commercial and educational leaders from nearly 70 countries. What did I do? Apart from twiddling my thumbs, I set out to make Beijingology the most comprehensive guide in the world about the Beijing Subway. At this time, it remained a publicly known internal wiki, where the whole thing appeared super-technical, but was still in English for the world to read.

In 2009, I started making use of Beijingology to create “real life” projects, including what used to be MobileMetro.info. It would be the first iPhone-friendly web site which did not require you to get an App Store account (or an Apple ID). Yep, it sapped up your 3G traffic, but it was an instant, light solution for mobile phones. You’d click a station, find an aspect or a question (like “where’s the exit?”), and I’d give you that straightaway. It was brilliantly designed, but it meant a lot of handcrafted code. Owing to the excess amount of work, I threw in the towel for the moment.

In 2010, I shifted my focus from city rail to national rail. In 2011, I made it big on national media by being one of the very first passengers on the state-of-the-art Beijing-Shanghai HSR, along with my wife. Today, I’ve merged the best of all worlds — HSR, metro and information — into the new Tracking China project.

The future of Beijingology now equates with the future of Tracking China. The infrastructure is totally there to give people the most detailled guide of riding the rails in mainland China.

Folks get around a lot over the summer. By summer 2012, the new site will be home to rail info for traffic between Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, as well as the entire Beijing Subway and key Shanghai Metro stations, and by late 2012, like a phoenix revitalized, a great number of the much sought-after info from the old Beijingology wiki will be with you.

The past few weeks chez moi has been filled with activity. Today, I’m sharing this bit with you as a kind of Status Report. I remain committed to making sure that having used my bit on the Web about getting from A to B in China — ideally, you’ll never be lost again.